David Brooks and the BoBo Shuffle

Yesterday, as Emily was writing her response to David Brooks’ most recent New York Timescolumn, I was stewing about exactly the same topic. I had been similarly inspired a few months back, when Kevin wrote on the rise of pop-intellecutalism, but had found myself too enervated to complete a post. Now, spurred by Emily’s questions, and those of our commenters, I thought I’d give it a try.

The answer to “the mystery of the two faces of David Brooks” is, I think, precisely that he is a divided soul. His New York Times columns and NewsHour appearances reveal a man torn between a heterodox sensibility (the Dr. Jeckyll who is clearly disappointed by the Bush years) and his paying gig as a 21st Century pundit… that is, as the Mr. Hyde whose job is to regurgitate talking points.

Unlike Robert Louis Stevenson’s protagonist, however, Brooks’ double life is heavily incentivized. The success of the Brooks franchise rests on his reputation as “The Republican Who Explains Republican thinking to Democrats.” And so he’s rewarded – financially and reputationally – for flourishes of ideological eclecticism. “Ah, what a fresh take on things,” we think, reading his appeals for a new politics. “A center-right analyst who speaks his mind, regardless of partisan pieties.” (It bears mentioning that there are few pundits on the left who show comparable flexibility or felicity.)

But it is documentable that Brooks’ flexibility only lasts while the electoral stakes for the G.O.P. are relatively low – as they were for most of the long ’07 – ’08 Democratic primary season. Whenever things begin to look dark for the national Republican party, Mr. Hyde emerges, dagger in hand. As a deft reciter of the party line, Brooks becomes an apparatchik for the very status quo he spends 20 months out of every election cycle bemoaning. (This is, by the way, the exact pattern that has characterized the 2008 McCain campaign, except that it’s easier to forgive McCain; he’s a politician, not an “analyst.”)

In print and on TV, Brooks comes across as a smart and sympathetic guy, but for at least seven years now, he’s been (however consciously) perpetrating intellectual fraud. In Aristotelian terms, he embezzles from a surplus of hard-won Ethical appeal to support a slush-fund of Pathetic biases. A dramatic case in point comes from the 2004 Democratic convention, when, immediately after John Kerry’s speech, he told PBS’ Jim Lehrer that Kerry had done “quite a lot better” projecting “muscular centrism”:

I think the lesson for Republicans is you’re not going to destroy this guy John Kerry. You’re not going to disqualify him from being president after this week. You’re going to have to make the other alternative that you’ve got your own version of muscular centrism.

The next day, in the Times, Brooks, apparently unnerved by Kerry momentum, pronounced the same speech, “an incoherent disaster.”

Perhaps Brooks actually bought his conceit that the “unforgiving light of day” had chemically altered the contents of the speech; a critic of partisan posturing should know better. More likely, he merely underrated the overlap between NewsHour viewers and Times readers. A writer who claims intimacy with the Bobo lifestyle putatively lived in, say, Chicago’s Hyde Park – the “exlusive enclave” where my schoolteacher in-laws rent an apartment two blocks from the Obamas’ lovely but by no means extravagant home – should know better.

In any case, it should have come as no surprise to see Brooks skewer Obama the day after the convention – particularly when I suspect that Brooks, likePaul Krugman, wrote his column on Thursday afternoon, prior to watching Obama accept the nomination. (Note the rhetorical ambiguity of Brooks’ column, the way it skirts the question of whether it is a reaction or a prediction. Ask yourself if Brooks could have based his analysis not on Obama’s delivery, but on the leaked text of the speech – a text he praised on the NewsHour, by way of denigrating the delivery. Now ask yourself again if you want to take Brooks’ reaction seriously.)

A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but, if history is any indication, David Brooks is consistently inconsistent, and so screwed either way. In the last two months before a closely fought presidential election, we can expect him to rediscover his talent as a canny, cynical partisan shill, for whom politics is merely a rarefied form of marketing, designed to play on consumers’ fears. And in this, he will be no more or less than a member in good standing of a proud band of brothers and sisters – Frank Rich, Der Krauthammer, George Will, Cokie Roberts, et al. Perhaps we should rebrand the Op/Ed pages as what they really are – Special Advertising Sections – and be done with them. Me, I’ll be off reading Andrew Sullivan.

Share this article

More from the Millions

2 Responses to “David Brooks and the BoBo Shuffle”

RfPat 7:53 am on August 31, 2008

From watching PBS during the DNC, I suspect Brooks was swept up in the energy of the convention. From what I saw, much of his commentary became more and more positive. I surmised that his gut reaction in the moment conflicts with his party principles once he's back at his desk. I'm not surprised to see the contradictions you document.